Staff Reporter
The students of secondary level across the country are suffering from textbook crisis. Although first month of the new academic year has already passed, the students are not getting textbooks to commence their study. Nobody knows when the textbooks will arrive to the learners.
The crisis has been created by syndicates of textbook publishers and sellers. The carelessness of the National Curriculum of Textbooks Board (NCTB) authority is also responsible for the crisis. Because, NCTB is the authority of publishing the textbooks.
The crisis began when NCTB introduced a new question method. A rumour spread among printing institutions that this year the textbooks would be changed and old books would not be used. Usually 30 percent of old books are re-used each year.
For the acute crisis of books, the affected students are buying books with higher prices than fixed by the NCTB. Although NCTB, announced 38 categories of textbooks out of 76 for classes six to nine in the curriculum under the board would be available at the market by January 15 and 22 categories by January 26, the NCTB has failed to do so. It began selling only 14 textbooks by the stipulated timeframe. For this academic year, NCTB assigned 291 institutions through lottery system to print 2 crore 62 lakh copies of books under 76 categories costing Taka 75 crore 41 lakh of textbooks for the secondary students.
A retailer at Nilkhet said, “We have to buy books at high rates from the wholesalers.”
“There is no alternative for selling books at high rates in such a situation where the wholesalers have even stopped giving us discount or commission,” said another retailer.
The wholesalers do not sell the textbooks in Dhaka, they sell them in district towns and remote areas to avoid the fixed price.
Due to the failure of the NCTB authority, many wholesalers are marketing pirated textbooks with the help of the latest computer technology in substandard paper.
The Ministry of Education has taken stringent measures against artificial crisis makers of textbooks in the country.
The Education Minister Nurul Islam Nahid visited the book market once more and took the initiatives to shun the book crisis.
The Minister sought cooperation from law enforcers to ensure availability of textbooks at fair prices in the markets.
Till now, the textbook crises have not been solved.
The NCTB hoped that the artificial crisis and additional prices could not be charged from the buyers as the ministry has taken firm steps against the syndicate.
Courtesy: nation.ittefaq.com
